Friday, 08 October 2010
So, remember how I performed a wedding ceremony back in July? If not, READ THIS. Or don’t; I guess it’s irrelevant to the rest of this post.
The thing is, that very same day, I also videotaped the bride and groom’s wedding and reception. Trust me, it’s a little tricky to videotape a wedding when you’re also the officiating minister, but I cleverly managed thanks to my tripod and my brother-in-law.
A few weeks after the wedding, I emailed the bride and groom to tell them that they should expect October as a completion date. It takes a lot of tedious, frustrating work to create a watchable video, and a wedding-slash-reception is a verrrry long video.
I didn’t even bother to import the footage into my computer until about a month ago. Isla was born, I was back at work, and I figured it was time for me to get cracking.
Let me just make this clear to anyone who’s reading this: I don’t want to videotape your wedding. Or your friend’s. Filming it is (sometimes) fun, but that’s the only fun part. The much more boring part – the part that takes the bulk of the time – is the editing. I think I’ve said this before, but a general rule of thumb is that I spend about an hour of work on every minute of footage I have.
In the past I’ve had as much as four hours of footage to work with, but thankfully, this wedding – with no bridal procession, no dancing, no formal dinner, and a very short ceremony – only left me with 61 minutes of footage.
I didn’t want to tape this wedding, either, but my sister kind of ‘sold’ my service to them before I had a chance to talk to them and, more importantly, I figured the money I made could be used during my leave-of-absence following Isla’s birth (it was).
So now here I am with all this footage, wondering why I’m editing this video when I don’t even have the money anymore.
I forced myself to work diligently on this wedding video all week, including my lunch hour today. I plan to work on it a little bit at home this weekend. I said I would get it done in October, and I’m gonna hold myself to that.
I’ll report back on November first.
Saturday, 09 October 2010
Today we took a walk with the Happy Trails Nature Club near the Mississippi River at Lock & Dam #1 in Minneapolis. It was a tough location to find, but luckily I knew we were within a mile of the spot, and Jennifer kept suggesting roads for me to take.
I’m glad we arrived on time this time. As you’ll recall, last month we arrived 20 minutes late and the group was gone. I bemoaned the fact that, had we been on time, the group probably would’ve waited for stragglers. And that’s exactly what happened today. We arrived about two minutes late and, getting out of the car, the woman who heads up the group said we were gonna wait around for people who might have trouble finding the place. Oh well, no worries.
The morning sunlight made for some beautiful views of the rive and the trees. Jennifer took lots of pictures, which she might post online one day.
In the meantime, here are pictures of us that I stole from the website:
See how picturesque it was?
Owen likes leaves. Too much.
Here are some of the kids posing in a fort they constructed.
See more pictures here: CLICK THIS.
Sunday, 10 October 2010
So here’ s where I make the obligatory comment about today’s date being 10-10-10. This sort of thing didn’t happen too often when I was growing up, but now we seem to have “special” dates like this all the time…
01-01-01
03-02-01
02-02-02
01-02-03
05-06-07
…to name a few.
Next year we’re in for quite a handful. There will be January 1st (1-1-11), followed quickly by January 11th (1-11-11), then there’ll be September 10th (9-10-11), November 1st (11-1-11), then November 11th (11-11-11).
To me though, the most special date (discounting any events and looking at the date from a purely numerical standpoint) was November 19, 1999. The date was entirely made up of odd digits: 11-19-1999. Sure, there had been plenty of entirely odd dates in my life (including 11-17-1999, just two days earlier), but that was the last one I’ll ever see. Yessiree, unless I’m still alive on January 1st, 3111, there will be no more completely odd dates in my life.
Another great date was a few months later, on February 02, 2000. Which was the first date made up of entirely even digits.
Man, what a great time to be alive!
In other news: Owen treated Jennifer and I to ice cream at IKEA this evening. He brought along his ‘wallet,’ which has some cash in it that he’s received from my mom for expressly this purpose, and he ordered ice cream for all three of us.